Savor the unctuous delivery, and think about it. His grand plan is to attract privileged white people by highlighting the fact that he wants lots of immigrants, and that his city will be a place where you start at the bottom and work your way up; where you don’t need none of that there college education, we’ll just stick you in low-paying apprenticeships; there’s a small chunk of land over in this corner where some farmers will raise all the food for the city on a “ranch”; and gosh, we’ll all be happier and have more fun if we shut off all of our gadgets and get off the internet and play with rocks.

Yeah, that’s a great sales job.

I also liked the bit where he says that the entrance is modeled after Ellis Island, because that’s where “we” all came from. I guess “we” doesn’t include black or Hispanic or native Americans.

I wasn’t able to watch the whole thing. There’s only so much Liber-babbling I can stand. But somehow, I don’t think his weird city will ever appear.

Hey, that sounds like a great idea! An isolated libertarian community where the Randians can go live without bothering us. We get our society back, and they get a truly free society with no Big Government telling them their beauty plasmids don’t meet Government Safety Standards or that doing horrible things to little girls to get sexual gratification ADAM is a Bad Thing.

I suspect Lord of the Flies is one possibility. The other I’d expect is it’d become something like one of those Scientology labor camps, where Glenn Beck gets unskilled labor from a bunch of naive libertarians at slave wages, and they’ll keep working hard because they think they’re in a meritocracy and haven’t climbed up the ladder because they’re not working hard enough.

My prediction: Beck raises a bunch of money, starts trying to build his compound, finds that building a complete civilization, even a libertarian one, is harder than he thought, quits and quietly spends the rest of the money he raised on beer.

Sounds like Thunderdome, but in this case it’ll be “ten thousand men enter and one really rich fucker leaves.”

And what’s this crap about everyone coming through Ellis Island? Doesn’t Herr Doktor Beck know anything about American colonial history? Heck, I’ve got ancestors from Tewkesbury, England who were in Varina, Virginia by 1634. I guess the American Revolution was fought by what, ghosts? I guess the only true Americans came from Germany about 1900.

2 billion of the yankee dollar.!..fuck that is tempting even in this age of severe austerity…can we not have a quick whip around?

Encourage them all to go there and stay to do …what ever it is they do…and set ’em metaphorically adrift on a sea of of pyscho-babble…tell ’em they can secede from the USA and then we can paaaartay!..like its the garden of bacchanalian delight throughout the city until the ending of time!

I assume this will be built on an oil field somewhere, since Beck is all about self-sufficiency, and producing more than is needed. Of course, they’ll need a refinery too. I’m sure those things won’t affect the cows or the crops, though (or the groundwater in general).

Or maybe he really is picturing a pre-industrial city, what with the lack of gadgets and all. So they’ll simply heat their houses the old fashioned way, with wood fires, and light everything with candles. I wonder what will happen once they’ve clear-cut all the wood within a couple days’ horse ride from the city?

Part of me really, really, wants to see this happen (though I don’t expect it will).

I agree with others that this is a great plan: put the Murdochs, Koch bros, Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, the Pauls, Ryan, Norquist (and his pledge), Karl Rove, Sean Hannity and the entire Fox “News” on-air yappers, and other Libertarian types in their own private place, lock the door, and loose the key. There are several efforts to create off-shore, ocean-based independent micro-nations (think Sea World). Seems like the perfect place for them. They’re already out to sea, so let’s put them in their proper place. Then we won’t have to smell their stench.

I also liked the bit where he says that the entrance is modeled after Ellis Island, because that’s where “we” all came from. I guess “we” doesn’t include black or Hispanic or native Americans.

Or those who arrived via other points of entry — Los Angeles, San Francisco, Baltimore, Boston — or arrived before Ellis Island opened or after it closed. I wonder how that would work for Mom’s mother’s family — the first time (1905) they emigrated from Poland, they arrived in Boston and the second time they emigrated from Poland they ended up coming through Ellis Island (even though Grandma was a US citizen (born in Salem, MA, in 1912)) and took a train up to Salem?

But somehow, I don’t think his weird city will ever appear.

Sounds like a good, right-wing uber-utopian fund raiser, though. I wonder how they will (legally) get around income taxes? Or state or federal property taxes? Are they going to declare the entire city to be a church? Sort of a Vatican in America?

And if it did I’d give it about two years before it goes all “Lord of the Flies”…

I give it until the first rape, robbery or fire.

Sounds like Thunderdome, but in this case it’ll be “ten thousand men enter and one really rich fucker leaves.”

And I betcha dollars to donuts that the ‘one really rich fucker’ is Beck.

I assume this will be built on an oil field somewhere, since Beck is all about self-sufficiency, and producing more than is needed. Of course, they’ll need a refinery too. I’m sure those things won’t affect the cows or the crops, though (or the groundwater in general).

Or maybe he really is picturing a pre-industrial city, what with the lack of gadgets and all.

well, he’s talking about producing TV shows and movies, so it seems electricity will be required.

And if it did I’d give it about two years before it goes all “Lord of the Flies”…

Some enterprising soul should install cameras all over the city that can be viewed remotely, then build a high wall around it. I’d say “airdrop weapons” but the people who’d flock to that place will have their own arsenals. The money made selling the video could be put toward public works, social services, and education.

Jadehawk:

“independent”, my ass.

They’d continue the fine libertarian tradition of mooching off their neighbors — local neighbors with electricity, or neighboring blue states with tax dollars.

Please please please Cthulhu let this happen. I envision something like L. Bob Rife’s Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates franchise from Snow Crash, complete with the babbling and the mind viruses. If we persuade them that what they really need to do is form a gigantic Raft, we could anticipate that the whole thing would eventually drift and park itself in the Pacific Trash Spot. Meanwhile, the rest of us can take the antivirus protection and proceed with a normal life of taxes, community resources, and (gasp) rules.

I assume this will be built on an oil field somewhere, since Beck is all about self-sufficiency, and producing more than is needed.

BWAHAHAHA. The only part of the Texas government that works is the Texas Railroad Commission. Which is in charge of regulating oil drilling. They’ll have the government all over them if they do that. (Also, they’ll get themselves killed. Oil drilling is not for amateurs.)

I’m sure those things won’t affect the cows or the crops, though (or the groundwater in general).

There is a sure-fire method for making money off of oil on your property without damaging the groundwater or scaring the cattle. It goes like this: 1. Own the mineral rights. Trust me, that’s not as “duh!” as it seems. 2. If there is any hint of oil on your property, oil companies will come sniffing around. 3. Allow them to pay a few thousand dollars for the privilege of investigating the possibility of drilling on your property. They’ll do this because it isn’t a huge investment and might have a large return. 4. Make sure that in the contract you specify that they can’t do any drilling that will affect the water supply and demand a plan that ensures that they don’t do so “accidentally”. 5. They’ll end up concluding that it can’t be done and go away, mildly miffed. Next year, another company will try it. Or the same company will.

My grandparents made their money that way for years. It’s not highly profitable, but it’s dependable and non-damaging enough that every fifth year or so you can also grow a crop on the same property. But I doubt that Beck will be content with making a subsistence amount of money and he’ll end up screwing the place up.

Glenn Beck. the modern day “Dusty” Rhodes. I predict that within the next decade Mr Beck will drop all pretense at political hucksterism and become a Televangelist full time. Why bother selling something when you can cajole millions into giving you 100.00 each? I’d go into the business myself, except my hypocrisy does have some limits.

Beck is just recycling some tired old pseudo-utopian city plans from the Modernist joke-book, and slapping a shiny “libertarian” label all over them. The whole thing is an obvious fraud, and a joke — until you start to imagine what sort of abuses will become commonplace within such a compound, once the doors are locked and the people are fully outside the protection of the US Constitution.

baryogenesis: that “citadel” plan looks like it’s designed to keep people in first, and keep out cops second, when they come in response to complaints of abuse. Yeah, a wonderful libertarian paradise inside TWO defensive walls, any relation to a standard prison is purely coincidental. What could possibly go wrong?

Some enterprising soul should install cameras all over the city that can be viewed remotely…

And once the gates were closed and the “founders” were in complete control, those cameras would provide an endless supply of rape-porn, which the city’s owners could sell to fund the whole enterprise forever. Who says libertarians can’t come up with a viable business plan?

And once the gates were closed and the “founders” were in complete control, those cameras would provide an endless supply of rape-porn, which the city’s owners could sell to fund the whole enterprise forever. Who says libertarians can’t come up with a viable business plan?

I’m pretty sure rape jokes are not exactly welcome here.
Although given an enclosed area with probably next to 0 police enforcement (or enforced by a bunch of angry white men with guns), rape may be inevitable.
Libertarianism, sounds nice in concept, shitty in execution.

Thinking about it, this seems to combine a bit of narcissism with a dash of defeatism. It’s narcissistic because they think they can build a utopia so easily. It’s defeatist because they lack the confidence to convince the rest of the world of the merit of their ideas. The latter isn’t helped by the fact that we’ve already tried their philosophy on the large scale and it didn’t work.

One experiment that comes to mind: Make an MMORPG version of one of these Galt cities. At least that way we can see it turn into Bioshock without actually risking lives. Of course, when it does collapse, they’ll blame it on the fact that it’s a simulation because simulations never tell us anything about reality.

From the sounds of it, he doesn’t really need a city: He should just be recommending that everybody turn Amish. The fact that he wants control and ownership of a non-technological work-farm where everyone enters with an economic blank slate reeks of Jonestown. And the very suggestion that people would have to give up their Rightly Earned Wealth in order to start out as equals in Libertaria? It has the stench of Communism! COMMUNISM, I SAY!

@Bronze Dog
#40
Actually, in a way, they already have. It’s called EVE Online.
Only in a very, very small section (I think its called High-Sec, or High Security) are the player protected (only so far as if someone attack you unprovoked, some extremely powerful ship will show up seconds later to kill your attacker. There’s no guarantee that you’ll be alive long enough for it to happen).
Most of the game area would be considered a libertarian paradise. EVERYTHING is player manufacture (as in build in-game factory, mine in-game resource).

I just noticed that the article Ed cites calls Beck’s fantasy a “libertarian commune.” That oxymoran sums up the rock-solid stupidity of the entire scheme. (News flash: there’s nothing “libertarian” about a fortified city. Read some history, you idiots, or at least look at the cool pictures of WALLS and CANNONS!)

And the comments (what few I had time for) are an absolute hoot. Some of them don’t get the “moran” reference, and the rest are arguing about who does or does not “represent” libertarians. Now we know what kind of people take Glen Beck seriously.

I thought about EVE Online, but I’m not sure if that really fits with the idea of a Galt city. It’s a game that features space travel, so not knowing much about it, I would guess there’s room for expansion and finding new resources to sustain the economy, since I presume there are untapped planets for colonization.

Do remember one EVE player featured in a Cracked list for the greatest acts of MMO trolling. He conned his way into being VP of a company, assassinated the president (twice, to perma-kill him), emptied the company’s bank account, bought the biggest warship available, and dared people to come after him.

Can’t help but wonder with all these guns: Who are they protecting themselves from? The government? The one thing the government has plenty of is weapons of mass destruction. And they’ve conveniently massed themselves together. Illegal immigrants? Random shooters? Zombie hordes? I think the guns are a fetish item in this utopia.

If this town has an 85-acre lake in it, and farming and a ranch — in Texas! — how are they going to get the water? How is that going to fit in with the neighbors’ usage? And state regulators’ rules? And the drying out of the Great Plains thanks to global overheating?

Then, thinking of places like Celebration, Florida, I have to wonder what kind of oppressive regulations the owners will impose. And do propertarians really want to live in a Pattern-Language, New-Urbanism setting where they’ll have to see other people and can’t hide in their status vehicles?

Meanwhile, the sketch in the video looks like a mash-up of various World’s Fairs, which is a shame because I like those buildings. But it’s also appropriate what with the robber barons and the nadir of American race relations in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

Finally, a few years ago I read Jack London’s “The Iron Heel”. This dystopian futuristic novel mentions two “wonder-cities” named Ardis and Asgard. I guess Beck’s city would get the former appellation, since the latter seems fitting for the one in Idaho. Two billion dollars buys a lot of serf labor.

In my own happy fantasy land, they build this thing and the deal is, they don’t pay any taxes to the outside world, but they also receive zero assistance of any kind from the outside world. Did the whole place burn down/get hit by a tornado/have the plague? Sorry, folks, nothing we can do; stay inside your walls and deal.

The problem, of course, is that this is clearly immoral if any of these people are bringing children into the compound. We may not have a moral obligation to protect stupid adults from themselves*, but we certainly have a moral obligation to protect children from their stupid parents, if their parents are stupid in ways that actively endanger the children.

(*I think maybe we do have a moral obligation to protect stupid adults from themselves, but the standards are much more open to debate, and the satisfaction level is a lot lower.)

Oh, wait– Yes, stupid adults, we will permit you to come back out and join civilization, if you sign this statement that says, “I am an idiot and made the stupidest fucking decision of my life, ever, to enter that stupid compound. Please use me as an object lesson for future generations.”

I thought about EVE Online, but I’m not sure if that really fits with the idea of a Galt city. It’s a game that features space travel, so not knowing much about it, I would guess there’s room for expansion and finding new resources to sustain the economy, since I presume there are untapped planets for colonization.

That’s technically not true anymore. The space is “vast”, but by this point just about everything and everywhere is already colonized by player. The only way for you to grab a new territory is.
1. Beat up the guy already holding it.
2. Be such a great guy that an alliance/corporation gift you an entire planet (even entire solar system). I remember a story of a guy, who build up a reputation as a reliable middle-man for trade (in-game trade can be dangerous, as the other guy could simply just blow up your ship to take your stuff), that an alliance gave him a entire solar system out of gratitude for handling some very important trade for them.
3. Do what you said, infiltrate an corporation, destroy their entire military/economic power, and make Step 1 easier.
This also mean that holding on to the new planet is difficult.

Do remember one EVE player featured in a Cracked list for the greatest acts of MMO trolling.

It’s not trolling when what he did is the expected behavior of the game. The game has pretty much just 2 rules. One, don’t hack the game (in a way, don’t break the law of physics in game). Two, don’t exploit bug. Everything else? Scamming, trolling, mass-murdering a bunch of other player? If you can do it and get away with it? Have fun!

He conned his way into being VP of a company, assassinated the president (twice, to perma-kill him)

From what I gather, this is what happened.
1. They destroyed the president’s ship, which cause him to lose his ship + whatever stuff he has on his ship. However, the player (in this case, the president), escape in an escape pod. The president still hold control of the company.
2. Then, they destroy the escape pod, which officially kill the president (forcing to respawn in his clones). The did this because they need the president’s corpse for the “contract”.

emptied the company’s bank account, bought the biggest warship available, and dared people to come after him.

I don’t think he needed to/can “buy” one. Actually, in most likelihood, the biggest warship in-game is next to impossible to buy, since the resource needed to build one is so vast (multiple weeks in real-time plus metric-fuck-ton of in-game resource. More than likely, he just steal the biggest warship from the victim corp’s hangar.

Oh, and btw, if you’re talking about the Ubiqua Ceraph heist (CEO killed, entire corporation treasury/resources/ships stolen), it’s not done by one player. Its a contracted kill by a corporation. Someone paid a corporation called “Guiding Hand Social Club” to infiltrate and kill Ubiqua Ceraph’s CEO and bring her body (in-game avatar is female) to them. The GHSC did just that, and as an added bonus for them stole all the stuff in the mean-time (a bunch of original blueprint, think of it as a copyrighted original of a space-ship design. Those who control the original blueprint can make and sell limited use copies.)

Um, yeah, so we’re saying certain companies can’t come here and compete? That these incredibly successful American businesses, the perfect example of the product of free enterprise, are not welcome in Beck’s Utopia? Yes, my irony meter is definitely broken.

Or are they just symbols of femininity to Beck, and he only wants manly men? I don’t know how much more I can watch to find out if he ever mentions women at all….or at least as more than breeders kept safely locked away at home.

But no, Beck isn’t thinking that deeply, he’s just spouting the things that he thinks will spark his viewers’ sense of nostalgia. He’s selling this city (if it’s not just a prop for continuing to sell the show) to the same audience he sells his show to: old folks who yearn for a time that never existed in reality, only in 50s television and their own distorted memories. But he certainly knows how to sell to those people. What he forgets is that his audience is ancient, he doesn’t appeal to enough young people to do the apprenticeships, the hard physical labor. At best he’ll build a retirement community.

Do remember one EVE player featured in a Cracked list for the greatest acts of MMO trolling. He conned his way into being VP of a company, assassinated the president (twice, to perma-kill him), emptied the company’s bank account,

bought the biggest warship available, and dared people to come after him.

I just did a more detailed check and it looks like from Cracked, you confused two event.
The first blockquote is the GHSC heist against a corporation (loses in equivalent of > $10,000 of real-world currency).
The second blockquote refers to the investment banking scam, where a player started an in-game bank (doing what real-world bank do, offer loan, and interest on saving). Once he has enough money in bank, he took it all (equivalent value of >$100,000 of real-world currency). He’s the one that bought the biggest warship and put a bounty on his OWN head just daring people to come collect the bounty on him.
Yes, this is a game.

That’s one possible angle where my slave labor hypothesis comes in: It’s going to be a corporation and the residents are going to be employees. It’d be largely indistinguishable from an authoritarian Communist regime, but everything will be phrased in “free market” terminology to gloss over the similarities.

What he is proposing is that a group of people get together to form an incorporation for their mutual benefit, a collective if you will. Through the united efforts of the collective towards a group of mutually agreed upon goals, probably stated at the outset, the people pseudo-voluntarily commit financial and temporal resources. I say pseudo-voluntarily because obviously one has to pull one’s weight within the collective in either financial or time-investment terms. No commitment, no membership of the collective.

Thanks to the people who cleared up my melding of the two EVE incidents, and for telling me how dangerous it is outside those high security areas. I suppose it makes for a more exciting game than if it was all about accounting IN SPACE.

Goddammit. Playing with rocks is a good thing, and the likes of Glenn Beck should not be allowed to besmirch a noble pastime.

In my case, it’s less of a pastime and more of a sideline. I work with rocks. And yes, sometimes working with rocks is so much fun it feels like playing.

I doubt that Beck can “read” rocks or landscapes. He is too divorced from reality, and too far off the reality-based education track to learn. Let’s not allow him to play with any rocks. That would be a grave insult to rocks.

I predict this city will look a lot like Deadwood. Filth and shit (that’s literal SHIT) everywhere, with a few craven bastards at the top exploiting the vast majority of the people living there. Sounds like heaven (eyeroll).

It’s going to be a corporation and the residents are going to be employees. It’d be largely indistinguishable from an authoritarian Communist regime, but everything will be phrased in “free market” terminology to gloss over the similarities…

I suppose it makes for a more exciting game than if it was all about accounting IN SPACE.

It’s exciting because there’s so many way you can play the game (most of which would probably fall under something that’s “highly illegal” in real world).
And to bring it back to the point of a libertarian world simulation, EVE Online is about as close as you can get.

I actually prefer the Citadel to Beck’s city. The Citadel has the advantage of being a walled town. That means it’s just one water main break (or 1 lake, 1 pump, and a couple of miles of firehose) away from being the world’s biggest above-ground lake.

And once the gates were closed and the “founders” were in complete control, those cameras would provide an endless supply of rape-porn, which the city’s owners could sell to fund the whole enterprise forever. Who says libertarians can’t come up with a viable business plan?

And once the gates were closed and the “founders” were in complete control, those cameras would provide an endless supply of rape-porn, which the city’s owners could sell to fund the whole enterprise forever. Who says libertarians can’t come up with a viable business plan?

It’s why I never played Eve Online. You could be minding your own business gathering resources then some other player who’s bored can come along and destroy your ship just for laughs and you can’t do anything about it.

If it’s a libertarian game then it reminds people that you need to work with others to survive. A lone person in the game is a target. It’s also a setting for those NutRA guys who want everyone armed. Wars break out on a pretty regular basis over there.

If you want a Free For All Player vs Player game where you have fun by ruining someone else’s day then EVE is for you. Otherwise, stay away.

ahhh, these people …. yes, give them their city. keep them sated so that they don’t have a chance to get near the levers of power in actual, you know, real society. if Bob Altemeyer’s Global Change Game iterations are any indication, they would destroy the planet many times over. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_change_game

…why would any libertarian true believer go there? It is, after all, predicated on the practice whereby everyone who arrives is stripped to equal status and then allowed to work themselves up, if they qualify.

Why would they want that? A few might dream that they’d have what it took to be dominant, but most of them know better.

Also, what of the skilled trades? Engineers (required to maintain everything), medical staff? Are they going to show up and be handed a shovel like everyone else? Fat chance. Beckistan would (1) recruit them, because they’re needed, and (2) hand them keys to a nice apartment when they arrive.

That is, unless they’re all fools. And then they’d be surrounded by broken machinery and dying.

They will produce more than they consume of everything. Why? Why not just produce a surplus in some industries and trade it for where there is a deficit in other industries. And when that balances out, spend some more time on leasure.

I don’t like farms… Seriously: I think the cows are plotting against me.

Whoah. Seriously. Whoah. Weapons-grade doesn’t begin to describe the conspiracy-theory-laced drugs he’s been smoking, but joke or not, how does this even occur to someone who’s not a professional comedian. And, yes, he’s described himself as a rodeo clown, but really? Really? And how do his viewers distinguish between FEMA concentration camps and “It’s the cows, man!”

Hey now, Beck may be attempting to recreate Bioshock, but you should never name something Citadel. It’s just begging for SHODAN to take over, and fictional deities are bad enough as it is.

In more serious news though, while it’s clear to us that Beck and his propaganda mill “news program” have long since gone off the deep end, I’ve watched several members of my family tumble down the road to conspiracy nuttery right along with him. It’s frightening, and just a little bit sad, honestly.

I’d join the club and say “leave the liberturds to do their own thing” except that you know damn well that they’ll behave like Dubai; all the citizens will be all Galt-Gods and they will get all the actual work done by exploiting a desperate workforce imported from developing nations eager to earn money to support their families. Which sounds ok-ish on the surface, until you realize that the imported workers have their passports taken away, live in barracks, are abused, threatened, and otherwise maltreated. (And it’s not just Dubai – there have been reports of this sort of exploitation and maltreatment happening in Canada and the US as well, with the full support of our governments.)

These are a group that at first blush look like the kind of people Beck would love. Strongly idiosyncratic, religious, hard working and dedicated to turning their backs on the rest of South Africa. And they have been making a success of it since the 1960’s.

There are a few negatives though. A neo-tribalist Kibbutz-like socialism is probably not what Beck has in mind. Also they would look down on him as a non-Afrikaner. Their racism is also aimed the wrong way, focussed inwards rather than outwards, they want to retract from society not rage against it.

I also liked the bit where he says that the entrance is modeled after Ellis Island, because that’s where “we” all came from. I guess “we” doesn’t include black or Hispanic or native Americans.

Actually, what he says is “that’s where most of us came from”, not all. Somehow it’s very indicative of the poisonous american political system that you manage to completely distort and misunderstand such a harmless statement.

Actually, what he says is “that’s where most of us came from”, not all. Somehow it’s very indicative of the poisonous american political system that you manage to completely distort and misunderstand such a harmless statement.

And it still isn’t even most. How many slaves came in through Ellis Island? How many Asians or Pacific Islanders? How many Hispanics?

See, from another talking head, that may have been an innocent statement. Given Glenn Beck’s history of public bigotry, racism, race bating, and othering, taking that statement with a grain of salt is contraindicated.